Prolific East Bay innovator of common medical devices dies at age 90

Jack Lloyd, the prolific East Bay engineer, entrepreneur and inventor, whose innovations include making the pulse oximeter, a life-saving medical device indispensable in hospitals worldwide, has died at age 90, his family announced this week.

Lloyd died May 1 in his Orinda home, with his wife, Lynne Dewar Lloyd, by his side. The couple were inseparable over their 64 years of marriage, and she died more than a week later on May 9.

“Jack was many things to many people: husband, brother, father, and grandfather,” his son Andrew Lloyd said about his father, who had five children, 11 grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

Lloyd’s long and distinguished career as an inventor and entrepreneur included an early collaboration with Nobel Prize-winning physicist and Manhattan Project scientist Luis Alvarez at the former Radiation Laboratory, now the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Lloyd once said he was always motivated by a simple desire: to create devices that solve difficult and life-threatening problems.

“I invent things because they solve a problem,” he said in a 2014 interview with the Bay Area News Group.

One of these problem-solving devices was the pulse oximeter, which was invented in the early 1970s by Japanese engineer Dr. Takuo Aoyagi. Lloyd is credited with helping to develop the device for routine use in the operating room. He sold it through Nellcor, the Hayward- and Dublin-based company he founded in the 1980s.

The device attaches to a patient’s finger and is used during surgery to measure oxygen in the blood. Medical experts hailed its widespread use as a fundamental breakthrough in anesthesia, operating room safety and critical care, with Andrew Lloyd saying it was a “fifth vital sign” that’s credited with reducing anesthesia-related deaths from 20,000 per year in the United States to mere dozens.

“It has been one of the most profoundly important medical devices developed in the 21st century,” Reid Rubsamen, an Ohio-based entrepreneur and board-certified anesthesiologist, said in 2017. “It changed the whole landscape of how we do anesthesia. It’s now the standard of care in the OR, post-op, intensive care and emergency departments; it’s something we couldn’t live without currently.”

Lloyd was born in Berkeley and raised in Lafayette by his parents, Lester Lloyd, one of the deans of the San Francisco printing industry, and Mildred Lloyd, a librarian at Stanley Middle School. Lloyd once said his parents had one governing rule for their children: Don’t walk past the Roundup Saloon, the town’s legendary dive bar, which had an unsavory reputation in the 1940s.

In 1954, Lloyd graduated from Acalanes High School, where he took “all the science courses,” edited the yearbook and rebuffed the football coach’s attempt to recruit him for the Dons football team. “He was kind of a bully, and I didn’t like him, so, no,” he said, according to his son.

Lloyd attended UC Berkeley and obtained a bachelor’s degree in engineering. After graduation, he went to work at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory, building and designing experiments for Alvarez’s Particle Physics group. Because of his contributions to the group’s experiments, Alvarez name-checked him in his speech when he accepted the Nobel Prize in physics in 1968 – the only person mentioned in the speech who was not himself a physics professor.

Lloyd later partnered with Alvarez, who was also a friend, in San Leandro-based Humphrey Instruments (now part of Zeiss), which made testing equipment for ophthalmologists and optometrists. With Nellcor, Lloyd grew the startup into a company with $200 million in sales. After that, he had several other medical device companies, including one that developed a system for asking basic triage questions to alert patients to the earliest signs of a congestive heart failure episode, allowing earlier and less expensive medical intervention.

More recently, his Walnut Creek-based company SafeninHome launched a system, using sensors and a two-way coaching platform, that is designed to help adults with developmental disabilities live independently. “Dad liked to say perhaps his greatest accomplishment was learning you ‘could do well by doing good,’” Andrew Lloyd said.

Ken Traverso, the CEO of SafeinHome who formerly worked at Nellcor, noted that “Jack had an insatiable interest in the ‘time-arbitrage of data.’” That is, in finding new measurements that could provide time-critical data quickly and efficiently to clinicians and other professionals who know “how to act” and “make a difference.” Traverso said, “That was a thread that ran through his whole career.”

“He liked to identify interesting problems, often on the edge of two fields, realizing that that’s where the biggest innovations were to be had,” Andrew Lloyd said.

Lloyd and his wife, Lynne Dewar Lloyd, will be interred together at the Queen of Heaven Cemetery in Lafayette. A celebration of life is planned for the couple on July 11 at the family’s home.